BOA Blog

Jim Daniels' Birth Marks in the media spotlight

October 21, 2013

Jim Daniels' new collection Birth Marks (BOA, 2013) has been in the media spotlight in recent weeks.
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review says the new book, "...seems to contain more instances of Black Sabbath, Iggy pop, Led Zeppelin and other figures not usually associated with serious poetry..." According to Daniels, these pop culture references "are connected to the omnipresence of technology."
“'There's a reason why it's called Birth Marks,'" says Daniels in the review. “'That place (Detroit) is where I'm from, and it's marked me. And it will mark me forever because birthmarks don't go away. The place where you grew up, that doesn't go away either, not if you're honest with yourself.' Reviewer Rege Behe comments on Daniels' poetry, specifically the seven-page "centerpiece" poem "Foundation," which "details teenagers engaging in an evening of revelry and rebellion, unaware they were marked by their parents for greater things ... By his [Daniels'] own assessment, it might be his most important work, because so much of his heart is this collection."
32 Poems Magazine's Justin Bigos also interviewed Daniels, and says, "[Jim Daniels’] poems… have sung of our daily existence, the lives of the suburban and urban, the family and the loner, the lovers and losers, the workers and the unemployed. And contained inside these songs are our most pressing moral and philosophical issues, in language as it exists in the larger culture, the hot breath of the world-right-now, and also in a voice, across fourteen collections of poems, that [he’s] somehow made all [his] own—the necessary contradiction, I think, for any great writer.”
A true working-class poet, Jim Daniels' Birth Marks was also featured in The Working-Class Studies Association's "Book Notes."
Click here to read the entire Pittsburgh Tribune-Review piece.
Click here to read the full interview from 32 Poems Magazine.
Jim Daniels' Birth Marksis available now at the BOA Bookstore.